Sessions

The essays are the product. This is the live edition: four sessions that take a group through the same material with discussion and exercises.

Run it when there are readers, not before. A cohort with an audience is easier to fill and easier to teach than a cohort built first.

Format

Four sessions of 90 minutes, in person or online. Each session covers two essays and asks participants to bring one exercise from each. The group should be mixed by discipline. The value is in hearing how a security engineer and a marketing manager read the same frame differently.

Session 1: what you reveal

• Essays: 01. The silence that isn’t, 02. The Dark Forest
• Warm-up: name three things you would notice only by their absence.
• Exercise: the public footprint audit. Compare results across the room.
• Discussion: when is silence a strategy, and when is it just neglect?

Session 2: what you spend, and who is watching

• Essays: 03. The Aestivation Hypothesis, 04. The Zoo Hypothesis
• Warm-up: estimate the energy cost of one task you do every day. Then look it up.
• Exercise: the observation map. Who can see the data, what decision it feeds, can the subject see it?
• Discussion: the difference between observability and surveillance is a relationship, not a technology.

Session 3: how groups decide

• Essay: 05. The Byzantine Generals
• Exercise: the five-node consensus simulation with one traitor, or the decision-process map.
• Discussion: what assumptions does your governance model quietly rely on?

Session 4: who can stop it

• Essay: 06. The Great Filter
• Exercise: present the kill switch policy. The room tries to break it.
• Close: the capstone memo. Pick one AI deployment you know about and write a one-page recommendation to a decision-maker, using at least three frames.

Facilitation notes

• Do not lecture the cosmology. Fifteen minutes of framing, then application.
• Every session should produce an artefact. If participants leave with only notes, the session failed.
• The mix matters more than the size. Six people from four disciplines beats twenty from one.